Turin, Italy and Madrid, Spain - Loquendo, the global speech technology company, announced the selection of Loquendo speech technology for Travel Club's pioneering ticket-booking voice portal.

More than 1,000 members currently fly each day with Travel Club, and the company has over 9 million members. An automated customer care service has now been developed by Telefónica to meet the needs of this expanding membership, incorporating Loquendo's award-winning text to speech technology.

Travel Club’s automated customer service is fully equipped to deal with all kinds of enquiries, including complex booking transactions, and provides a flexible service that callers feel comfortable interacting with, thanks to Loquendo’s expressive synthetic speech and highly robust speech recognition, as well as to Telefónica’s expertly designed automated dialogues.

Since setting up the new portal, Travel Club has expanded its services, consolidating quality to improve its members’ user experience while increasing automation and achieving greatly reduced costs. Calls are now handled by Loquendo’s highly intelligible TTS and extremely accurate ASR, allowing the service to deal successfully with more enquiries every day and freeing operators to devote more time to those calls requiring personal attention. The result is a cost-effective service which members find a real pleasure to use.

Following the success of this solution, expansion will be possible to other areas, such as hotel reservation and vehicle hire, enabling members to take care of every aspect of their holidays in advance, all through the same efficient and user-friendly voice portal.

Loquendo TTS is the only speech product on the market with an emotional component, expressive TTS, delivering truly lifelike synthetic speech to make any speech application natural-sounding and easy to use. Loquendo TTS and Loquendo ASR are available in many languages, currently including: U.S. and U.K. English, Castilian Spanish and Catalan, Mexican, Brazilian, Argentinian, Chilean, Portuguese, Italian, German, French, Canadian French, Dutch, Greek, Swedish, Mandarin Chinese and Polish - in both male and female voices - and the language portfolio is continually expanding.

About Loquendo - Vocal Technology and Services
With over 30 years experience in speech technology, Loquendo is at the forefront of the global speech market. Loquendo TTS, Loquendo ASR, Loquendo Speaker Verification and the Loquendo VoiceXML/CCXML Platform are high-quality, high-performance technologies that guarantee systems integrators the best solutions in 20 languages with 47 voices.

Loquendo is the only speech technology vendor that provides a complete product line for navigation and handheld devices, desktop PCs and telephony servers, guaranteeing the same portfolio of languages and the same core engine in all these environments.

Many enterprises and carriers worldwide have recognized the Loquendo difference, advanced technologies that power millions of calls every day in telecommunications and enterprise markets across the globe.

Loquendo is a Telecom Italia company headquartered in Turin, Italy, with offices in the US, Spain, Germany and France, and a worldwide network of partners. For more information about Loquendo, and to hear demos of all the Loquendo voices, go to www.loquendo.com.

About Travel Club
Travel Club is a loyalty scheme with multiple sponsors managed by the company Air Miles España PLC. It is a free service and its objective is to reward frequent buyers of their products with points that they can exchange for travel and/or gifts. It has more than 5 million affiliates and nine million users. Its shareholders are BBVA, Grupo Eroski, Repsol and Iberia. At the moment it has 36 sponsoring companies, leaders in their respective activity sectors, representing more than 12,000 sale points.

The Travel Club website, www.travelclub.com, has been converted into one of the main tools of communication. It monthly receives more than 720,000 visitors and has 15 million viewed pages. 35% of the points that are redeemed for prizes are done through digital channels.